The present invention relates to an editing apparatus which is widely used in a variety of industrial fields, such as OA, research, development, education, publishing, and finance to provide a function of retrieving and editing electronic data.
Recently, easy-to-operate editing apparatuses, as of wordprocessing or spread sheet programs, are acquiring several millions of general users, and it therefore can be assumed that a latent demand for an editing apparatus capable of editing different kinds of related electronic data is becoming strong. For this reason, conventional editing apparatuses start to provide a unified function of editing different kinds of electronic data on the same screen, an electronic publishing (DTP) function having one characteristic feature of expressing different kinds of electronic data on a single file, or a MIDI interface for editing sampled sounds and software for outputting the edited sounds in the form of musical scores. In addition, a wordprocessor with a proofreading function, such as a spell checker, is becoming commercially available as an intelligent editing apparatus for a single kind of data.
Even the use of these unified functions, however, can realize only saving of a time and labors required to initialize each software programs. That is, there has not been provided a labor-saving function capable of automatically loading different kinds of electronic data referred to each other, or automatically retrieving or updating an equivalent description on the basis of a comparison between different kinds of electronic data.
More specifically, in a document editing apparatus for simultaneously editing both documents and figures, for example, in order to retrieve a list of figures or a set of figures being referred in a given set of descriptions, an operator must type character strings by tracing back his or her memory, thereby retrieving a figure file. In addition, when the name of a newly defined technical term in a document is changed, a user must correct a document file and a figure file. In this case, a user who is forced to repeatedly perform the same operation may make mistakes upon correction. This also indicates a serious drawback of this conventional apparatus.
Japanese Patent Application No. 1-251496 (Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 3-111967)discloses an arrangement of an editing apparatus for processing only documents as an example of a single kind of data, which is assumed to solve the above conventional problems. With this arrangement, it is possible to analyze an input document, hold an internal linguistic structure of the analyzed document, and designate an object to be edited for each of various syntactic units. However, Japanese Patent Application No. 1-251496 does not touch upon any technique applicable to a case where objects to be edited involve both different kinds of data such as document and figure data.